Our Application Management Outsourcing Guide 2024

Trends in Application Management Outsourcing 

These days, our mobile devices have gone far beyond simple tools for communication and entertainment. eMarketer found out that around 90% of our time with smartphones is spent on applications. No wonder that a modern business can’t meet customers’ expectations without a well-performing application solution.

According to Grand View Research, financial services and healthcare are driving demand for application management services today. They actively incorporate apps into their workflow and require the highest levels of security, functionality, and the latest tech to guarantee the best performance. The prevailing majority of companies in other industries have already introduced or are on the way to building their applications. According to Statista, by 2025, people will have downloaded about 187 billion applications. 

Unfortunately, a great many examples from recent history show us that launching an app is not enough for business success. We will recall the revolutionary Pay by Touch application that was established in 2002. They were among the first to provide biometrically personalized, highly secure solutions to access credit cards, checking, healthcare, loyalty, and other sensitive personal data. The app could have changed the world of payments decades ago, but their lack of inner resources in providing proper application management led to bankruptcy in 2008 and left their clients in the dark.

We advise you to learn from others’ mistakes and study our guide for your winning application management outsourcing.

Arrange Application Management Directions

It would be best to start with carefully arranging your goals and directions for effective application management. What are the primary aims? What is essential for your success and future development? At first, think about how you will set the following critical stages in the ongoing support of your product.

• Proactive monitoring and troubleshooting. Users do not want to struggle with their apps. And the superpower of professional application management is to foresee and solve problems before they distract your clients. So, it is essential to have a team and tech for proactive performance.
• Performance management. In today’s landscape of diverse apps, users no longer have to tolerate sluggish production or deal with time-consuming logs. They deserve a seamless experience. To achieve this, a dedicated service team is a must. It ensures that your app runs like a well-oiled machine, allowing users to concentrate on their tasks without any disruptive hiccups. Whether it involves fine-tuning code or monitoring system health, adopting a robust approach to performance management empowers you to meet user expectations and elevating overall satisfaction.
• Incident management. Anything can happen — and real life continually proves that. However, even though in life we can’t be ready for everything since we can’t predict that, it shouldn’t be the same for your application. Because, as a matter of fact, it is possible to predict risks and be aware of the server-side issues or problems with the provider that you might run into. When that happens, it is critical that the team responds to such things fast to save users from unpleasant customer experience and avoid consequences. That is why it's vital to have a solid team of professionals that is ready to handle any issues 24/7 at your disposal.
  
• Help desk services. One more team should be constantly available for your application users. We are talking about a help desk to solve all their questions asap. And the operation time of 24/7 is the most desired option.
• Enhancement management. When you launch your application project, your competitors do not give up their attempts to beat your success. If you stand still and do not think about ongoing development, you will soon find your project on the sidelines of the business. It would help if you had a team for enhancement application management to ensure progress.

Let us stop at this stage and answer the question — does your company have enough resources to house all the teams we mentioned earlier? The best solution here is to choose application management outsourcing to guarantee your product’s prolonged success.

Define Application Management Outsourcing Benefits

Why do companies choose application management outsourcing (AMO)? The reasons, of course, are individual, but the main benefits for business lay in several perspectives. Before selecting the best suitable management outsourcing model, you should clearly define what your business will get from your potential vendors. Consider the following ideas.

• Top service quality. When you choose a reliable vendor, you can take advantage of professional application management support practically right away from the launch of the project. You do not need to waste precious time and a lot of effort on building teams, onboarding, and trial runs.
• The latest tech. Outsourcing services provide global access to a vast pool of the newest tech competencies. You do not have to search for hiring local professionals in front-end or back-end development, AI/ML engineers, data scientists, or other specialists to provide a robust operation of your application.
• Scalable teams. The great advantage of AMO is the ability to adapt the service to particular tasks of the moment. You can scale an outsourced team much easier according to the size of the project or the tech needed than an in-house team.
• No tedious work. By outsourcing services in managing and supporting the application, the company gets rid of monotonous tedious work, and its specialists can focus on developing new projects. Seriously, when you have great talents in your team, why should you overstrain them with clients’ reports or server version upgrades?

As you can see, application management outsourcing (AMO) provides significant benefits for companies in both the current support and the ongoing growth and progress. Moreover, outsourcing services enable the creation of the best suitable models for cooperation. Let us turn to the next part of our guide and see some more insights on delivering your app’s top-quality service and performance.

Decide on Outsourcing Management Methods

The modern application management outsourcing market offers a wide range of vendors. The main options to choose from can be presented in the following groups: onshore, nearshore, or offshore. You have to determine whether a team of specialists should manage your app from your country or one of the neighboring ones, or, maybe, the best talents are situated on the other side of the globe. It will help if you consider the price of the service, that’s obvious. But mind the time zone differences, variations in legal regulations, and even cultural diversities while making your decision. Sometimes a better option is to set a mixed support team when one vendor is responsible for the customer service side of your application, and the tech maintenance is delegated to another vendor.

When you decide on the sources of application management, it is time to set payment models to get the max revenue for your budget.

Prepare Pricing Models

Application management outsourcing (AMO) can be arranged in several pricing models. Let us name their main advantages.

• Hire a dedicated unit. You can agree on hiring a full-time service team to work on your project. This option is great for specialized applications and for companies that do not have available resources within the unit but opt for stable support of their customers, like apps for retailers. They can decide to outsource the complete support service to a vendor and cut the expenses.
• Fixed price. The companies can buy AMO services by paying monthly or annual fees set by the vendors. Companies with enterprise applications that require regular monitoring and maintenance but do not need full-time involvement can choose this type of outsourcing service subscription. A fixed-price type also helps to predict your future expenses.
• Incident-based price. When it comes to specialized applications, as some health apps, it is not necessary to overpay for the support service. A vendor can solve issues only when they occur and then bill by the time spent on fixing the problems.
• Value-based price. This model is growing in popularity for AMO. The core idea of agreeing on a value-based price lies in the following outcomes of collaboration. For example, when the result of the application outsourcing can be measured by the increasing number of active users of the app. Meanwhile, the main challenge while deciding on this pricing type is to set clear criteria for measuring the output.

One more thing about the price. One definite model can be great, but there is always a path for flexible solutions. Carefully built mixed pricing solutions can become the best outsourcing service pattern. After clearing the factors mentioned earlier, you should make the final and most crucial decision.

Choose a Vendor

Today, the essentials of choosing a reliable vendor are not rocket science. But there are several vital moments we want you to focus on while considering the best collaboration for your project.

• Transparent collaboration model. ISO certification assesses companies’ competencies in practically every business process or workflow. A certified outsourcing partner arranges all the functions and guarantees top quality from the launch of the project and the continuous stable output.
• Effective approaches. Check what methodologies are used by your vendor to deliver the best tech and production for your customers. Advanced Agile teams provide top-quality application management for your application.
• Extra security. It is a highly sensitive issue while choosing a vendor. The best strategy is to partner with a company that has the ISO 27001-certified Information Security Management System and ensures a secure business environment for its client’s data.

Take-Away

We believe that intelligent application management outsourcing can help your project surpass the results of the loud names we started our story with. Wisely arrange the directions for the sustainability of your app, make clear what particular benefits you are going to get, and estimate the methods of outsourcing that are ideal for you. After that, prepare pricing models for collaboration and pay special attention to choosing a reliable vendor. Surely, this guide is not intended to be exhaustive but even these insights will prove their worth if taken into account.

To learn more about our extra-quality competencies, contact our specialists. And keep up with our blog for more professional insights and expertise.